2018 Comprehensive St. Lawrence University
At first glance, St. Lawrence University might give the impression that it is an institution far removed from the rest of the world. Founded in 1856 in Canton—a town of 10,000 in upstate New York— St. Lawrence is a private liberal arts institution with a student body of 2,500. Ottawa, Ontario, is the closest major city, located 80 miles away across the Canadian border. But it is the university’s remote location that fuels a need to give its students an international perspective.
“St. Lawrence is indeed very isolated. Because of that, there has been very strong faculty leadership to implement more global engagement,” says Marina Llorente, a professor of modern languages and literature who became associate dean of international and intercultural studies and senior international officer in 2016.
St. Lawrence’s commitment to global engagement dates back to the 1920s, when students established the first International Relations Club on campus. Beginning in the 1930s, the institution hosted a series of cross-border conferences on U.S.-Canadian relations in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1949, St. Lawrence hosted the world’s first Model United Nations. The institution was also one of the first U.S. universities to actively engage in East Africa in the early 1970s.
“The drive to explore and understand the world beyond our rural upstate New York campus has been part of St. Lawrence University’s institutional DNA for over 90 years,” said President William L. Fox. “St. Lawrence has continuously focused on building international components into curricular and cocurricular programming. You can say that internationalization is central to what we do and who we are.”
Nine percent of St. Lawrence’s total student population comes from abroad, but the institution also serves highly qualified, often high-need students from the surrounding region in upstate New York. More than 20 percent of the domestic undergraduates are eligible for Pell grants.
“For those students, the sort of international perspective we have is amplified even more,” says Karl Schonberg, vice president of the university and dean of academic affairs. “There is a really interesting relationship between the local and the global here because of that mix of students in our population.”
Prior to Llorente, Schonberg served as the associate dean of international and intercultural studies, leading the Patti McGill Peterson Center for International and Intercultural Studies (CIIS). CIIS oversees all international programming on campus, manages off-campus study programs, and coordinates a number of area studies programs. The associate dean position is filled by a tenured senior faculty member who serves for 4 years, with a possible two-year extension.
Opportunities for Internationalization Through Off-Campus Programs
Since 1987, CIIS has coordinated the international and domestic off-campus programs, which previously operated through individual departments. CIIS currently manages 30 off-campus study programs in more than 25 countries. These programs provide significant professional development opportunities for faculty members. Forty-six percent of full-time faculty have led off-campus study programs of various lengths.
English professor Natalia Singer says that she never would have imagined that joining the faculty at St. Lawrence would take her as far afield as France and India. “There are so many projects and endeavors that have helped internationalize our curriculum that I’ve been able to take part in. I’ve been able to not only broaden my own curricular specialities, but also to direct and teach abroad,” she says.
Students similarly benefit from a myriad of options available for experiential learning. Almost 70 percent of students participate in an off-campus study experience prior to graduating. The Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Open Doors report ranked St. Lawrence 15th among the top 40 baccalaureate institutions for the number of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs in 2015–16.
St. Lawrence offers five signature semester- or yearlong study abroad programs in France, Kenya, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and its First-Year program in London, England. In addition, it runs signature domestic off-campus programs in the Adirondack Mountains and New York City. The university has seen significant growth in its off-campus summer programs over the last several years. In summer 2018, for example, St. Lawrence offered 12 courses in Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom, and two in the United States.
Madeleine Wong, associate professor and chair of global studies, recently spent a semester teaching in St. Lawrence’s First-Year program in London. As an alternative to the institution’s on-campus First-Year program in Canton, students live together in central London and take liberal arts courses that focus on developing their writing, speaking, and research skills. “I wanted to make sure that our program did not reinforce or perpetuate some of the tourist expectations that students have about study abroad,” Wong says.
A particular area of focus has been the creation of education abroad programs for students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). A growing number of students in these disciplines have been able to engage in off-campus programs due to concerted faculty efforts; in 2016–17, approximately 29 percent of students in off-campus programs were STEM majors.
Ten years ago, Ed Harcourt, professor of computer science and mathematics, worked with CIIS to develop the first education abroad program for engineers. The result was a semester-long program hosted by the University of Otago in New Zealand. “Over the years, I’ve been hunting around for places for our science, math, and engineering students to study abroad. The biggest constraint is being able to take these classes, science and math classes, in English,” Harcourt says.
St. Lawrence STEM majors also have study abroad options at James Cook University in Australia, the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China.
Funding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Abroad
In addition to its credit-bearing off-campus programs, CIIS offers a variety of opportunities for students to conduct research or pursue personal projects abroad. CIIS receives support from various donors, many of whom are alumni of off-campus programs, to fund travel enrichment grants that allow students to pursue an academic or personal interest while studying abroad. Travel research grants are also available to students who want to pursue more extensive study or research through independent travel or during an extension of an off-campus study program.
Music major Emma Greenough received a CIIS travel research grant to attend the Russell Memorial Weekend festival in Doolin, a small coastal village in Ireland, during her semester abroad in Cork City. “My goal of this brief, yet informative and meaningful trip was to show how Irish music and its culture, including its natural beauty, are intermingled throughout the country,” she says. “My study abroad experiences, especially my time in Doolin, nurtured my love of Irish music and provided me reason to return [to Ireland] in the future.”
The CIIS Fellows program is another funding opportunity that supports faculty-student collaboration throughout the world and has funded 33 projects since 2001. The Fellows program is noncredit bearing but may lay the foundation for future academic work such as a senior capstone project.
Wong took four students abroad to conduct independent research through the CIIS Fellows program. In July 2018, she accompanied global studies major Shanice Arlow to Namibia to examine how notions of race impact different populations in post-apartheid Namibia. Wong and Arlow received $7,500 from CIIS to conduct interviews with people across multiple generations and do archival research at the National Library of Namibia.
Wong says the students’ projects are often tangential to her own research interests: “My role is to foster a sense of intellectual curiosity and experiential learning of the world in my students. Each of the students have their own interests, and my job is to help them develop critical thinking skills and [learn] how to do research in a foreign place to enhance their understandings of diverse global issues. I’m there to supervise them and teach them to ask interesting questions.”
Encouraging Self-Awareness Through Global Studies
St. Lawrence’s off-campus study programs provide a way for students enrolled in interdisciplinary area studies programs to gain international experiences and still complete their degree requirements. The university offers degree programs in African, Asian, Canadian, Caribbean/Latin American, and European studies, as well as programs in Native American and African American studies. Drawing on the strengths of its area studies programs, the institution received a $1 million external grant from the Endeavor Foundation to support five faculty positions and establish the Global Studies Department in 2000.
Professor of global studies Eve Stoddard was the first chair of the new department. She says that the global studies major was born from the fact that many themes in international studies cut across countries and disciplines. In addition to learning a second language, global studies majors take five core courses that introduce them to key concepts and debates related to global processes, political economies, and cultural studies. Students also design a concentration, which might be an intense area study or a cross-cutting theme such as gender studies.
The global studies curriculum is designed to encourage students to examine their own identities and place in the world through a global studies lens. “A lot of our students have developed that critical self-awareness of who they are, …their roles in society, [and] their responsibilities to the world, to their local communities, and to the world,” Wong says.
Britni Stupin knew she wanted to major in global studies when she was accepted to St. Lawrence. As she started to take her global studies courses, she began to gravitate toward topics related to Africa and public health.
Stupin was able to further pursue these interests through the Semester in Kenya program, which is run through St. Lawrence’s campus in Nairobi. While she was there, she focused on a community approach to health care. Stupin had the opportunity to work as a health programs intern at a nongovernmental organization in Kigali, Rwanda. “In essence, global studies has allowed me to find and pursue my academic interests and passions and has given me the tools necessary to think critically about the world around me,” she says.
Establishing a Long-standing Footprint in Kenya
Stupin is one of more than 2,000 students who have studied in Kenya since St. Lawrence launched its first semester-long program there in 1974. In 2014, the institution celebrated 40 years of engagement in East Africa, based out of its five-acre Nairobi campus, which currently employs 17 Kenyans. “The program is very much about not encountering East Africa, but engaging and embedding yourself in the local community,” says Matthew Carotenuto, a professor of history who also coordinates the African Studies program, which launched in the 1980s.
During the first week of the Semester in Kenya program, students live in accommodations on the Nairobi campus and participate in a weeklong orientation that prepares them to live independently in Kenya, with an emphasis on safety and security. Students spend 8 weeks on the campus where they take a series of courses, including Swahili and “Culture, Environment and Development in East Africa.” The group participates in rural and urban homestays as well as three extended field experiences in northern Tanzania and in various locations in Kenya. After the first 3 months in Kenya, students do a monthlong independent study, often with a placement at a host organization that works with an issue that interests them.
In addition to Kenya, students are placed all over East Africa, including Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. For instance, students have interned with a member of the Kenyan parliament who is a St. Lawrence alumnus, and other students who are interested in public health have been placed at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
St. Lawrence strives for a mutually beneficial relationship in its overall approach to engagement in Kenya. Since 1984, the university has offered annual scholarship opportunities to Kenyan students to study in Canton, New York. Many Kenyan alumni who have studied at St. Lawrence have gone on to distinguished careers across Kenya, including four who were elected to the Kenyan parliament.
Emmanuel Ngenoh, a computer science and economics major who graduated in 2015, says his scholarship to St. Lawrence changed his life. While he initially struggled to adjust to life in Canton, he received support from the close-knit campus community and his host family. “I went from wanting to go back home the first few months at St. Lawrence, to not wanting to leave at all my senior year,” Ngenoh says.
He has subsequently returned to East Africa, where he has worked as a software developer and cloud solutions specialist. Ngenoh is currently planning on enrolling in a master’s program in information systems management at Carnegie Mellon University, which includes 1 year of study in Australia and 1 year of study in Pennsylvania. “There is no question as to how my experience at St. Lawrence University has influenced my adaptability in the world and expanded my abilities,” Ngenoh says.
In 1992, the university created a standing two-year position for a visiting Swahili scholar who can either conduct research toward a PhD from a Kenyan university or earn a master’s degree from St. Lawrence. The current visiting scholar, Khalid Omar Kitito, previously worked as an education officer at the National Museums of Kenya and interacted with St. Lawrence students who visited the museums in Mombasa as part of the Semester in Kenya program.
As the visiting scholar, Kitito taught Swahili and two semesters of “Swahili Culture and Identity,” which were intended to help students understand cultures other than their own. Moreover, Kitito taught a course titled “Hakuna Matata” for Canton area high school students to share Kenyan cultures and cultural practices. While at St. Lawrence, Kitito earned a master’s degree in human development and school counseling. He says his stipend has also helped fund his PhD program in Kenya.
Creating an International Community on Campus
In addition to welcoming international scholars on campus, St. Lawrence has made international student recruitment a strategic priority. The university has doubled its overall international undergraduate student population from 4 percent in 1995 to 8.5 percent in 2016. The campus hosted a total of 217 international undergraduate students from more than 60 different countries in 2016.
A large number of St. Lawrence University’s international students come from United World Colleges (UWC), a network of 17 high schools around the world, with support from the Shelby Davis Foundation, which offers up to $20,000 in financial aid per student. “They’re among the very best students on this campus and they’re involved in everything you can mention,” says President Fox.
With the growing international student population, St. Lawrence has increased the number of staff supporting the students’ academic and social adjustment. In addition to organizing intercultural activities, CIIS staff have focused on integrating domestic and international students. One way they have done this is through the creation of a living learning community called InterCultural House (I-House). I-House was established in 1984 as a coed facility accommodating around 80 domestic and international students. The internationally themed community offers diverse events, trips and community building activities, and a weekly tea time that encourages domestic and international students to come together and interact.
Another major initiative is the Global Gateways program, which is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program seeks to foster intercultural exchanges while strengthening the bond between domestic and international students. In summer 2017, the program brought together 19 international students and six domestic students for a twoweek program prior to the start of the fall semester.
“Global Gateways seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn about the different people that live around the world who go to St. Lawrence,” says undergraduate Connor Glitz. “In 17 short days, the program transformed us from an international group who didn’t know each other into a family of St. Lawrence students.”
Svetlana Kononenko, an international student from Russia, wanted to join the program after struggling to connect with international peers in high school. “Paintballing, swimming, campus kitchens, biking, presentations, classes, and games late at night made Global Gateways into a memorable and valuable experience,” she says.
The program represents a microcosm of St. Lawrence’s overall strategy for bridging the local and global. “I strongly believed that this...program would help me to develop leadership skills and find my niche in a truly global university community by providing a forum for both international students and domestic students to blur the line of difference, thereby building an inclusive community,” Kononenko says. “And that’s what I found.”